The Myrtles Plantation

The most famous Myrtles ghost story is Chloe.

The story, as it is usually told: Chloe was an enslaved woman at the Myrtles. She was the domestic of the Woodruff family. According to the legend, she was caught eavesdropping on a private conversation and as punishment had one ear cut off. She wore a green turban to cover the injury. Later, according to the legend, she baked a birthday cake containing oleander leaves, a poisonous plant, intending to make the family mildly sick and then nurse them back to health, proving her value. The two Woodruff daughters died. Chloe was hanged by other enslaved people on the property.

This is a dramatic story. It is also, historians note, not supported by any documentary evidence.

There is no record of a woman named Chloe in the Woodruff household. The two daughters who died, Cornelia Gale and Mary Octavia Woodruff, are documented in historical records. Their cause of death is listed as yellow fever, which was killing enormous numbers of people in Louisiana throughout this period. Yellow fever did not need any help from oleander.

The Chloe story appears to have developed sometime in the 20th century. Where it came from exactly, nobody is sure.

What is sure: there are a lot of ghost stories that center on enslaved people, built by the people who owned the houses they haunted. The stories are usually about the enslaved person being guilty of something.

William Winter is a different story. William Winter is documented.

He was an attorney. He bought the Myrtles in 1860. He was shot in 1871.

The story: he was standing on the porch when a stranger rode up on horseback and called his name. Winter stepped off the porch. The stranger shot him.

Winter went inside. He made it up the stairs. He died on the seventeenth step.

Not the eighteenth. Not the landing. The seventeenth step specifically, which his body apparently chose with some precision.

Guests at the Myrtles report hearing footsteps on the stairs at night. Slow, labored footsteps, making it most of the way up before stopping. Stopping, reportedly, at the seventeenth step.

I need you to think about what it would be like to be staying at a bed and breakfast and hear someone slowly climbing the stairs toward you and then stopping.

And then nothing.

Just stopping.

The Myrtles has left this detail in every version of the tour because it is the detail that does the work. The specific step. Not 'he died on the stairs.' The seventeenth step. The specificity is the haunting. The specificity says: something remembers exactly where it ended.

There is a mirror in the Myrtles that people do not like.

It is a large antique mirror, French, installed in the house in the 19th century. The legend is that it was not covered when members of the household died, which in Victorian tradition means the spirits of the dead became trapped in the glass.

People photograph the mirror.

The photographs, sometimes, show things. Handprints. Figures. Shapes that are not in the room when the photograph is taken.

I will tell you that photographs of old mirrors in dimly lit plantation houses are very good at showing ambiguous shapes, and that people looking for something in a photograph will often find it.

I will also tell you that the mirror has its own exhibit at the Myrtles and that staff report that it gets moved back to its spot when guests try to relocate it during the night, which is not something they admit to doing.

The handprints are the specific detail. Handprints that appear and disappear. Small ones and large ones. The small ones are attributed to the children.

There are always children in the ghost stories of plantation houses. The children are always the saddest part.

The mirror stays covered in some photographs taken there. People cover it before they sleep. This is, as a choice, something I understand completely.

Twelve ghosts.

Let us do a rough inventory.

There is the Chloe ghost, the green turban, moving through the house, whose historical existence is disputed but whose ghost seems very present.

There is William Winter on the seventeenth step.

There are the Woodruff children, who died of yellow fever, who are heard laughing and seen at windows.

There is a Native American woman, attributed to the Tunica people who are said to have had a burial ground on this land before the house was built. This one is a layer of older grief beneath the plantation grief, which is already a considerable amount of grief.

There is a man in a black hat who stands at the end of beds and watches guests sleep. He does not do anything else. He stands. He watches. He is considered alarming.

There are various others. Reports vary. Twelve is probably a round number. The actual number of things that have happened in a house on this property since 1796 is not countable.

The Myrtles is one of the most studied locations in American paranormal investigation. Teams come regularly. They set up equipment. They record hours of footage. They come away with, depending on who you ask, either evidence or ambiguity.

But the guests keep coming. The beds are full most nights. People drive to St. Francisville specifically to sleep in a house with twelve ghosts.

That is either very brave or very practical. Probably both.

You can book a room at the Myrtles Plantation tonight. Right now. If you wanted to.

They have a website. They have a booking form. The rooms have names. There are packages that include the ghost tour. There is a restaurant. The food, by most accounts, is quite good.

The house is still standing, which after 228 years is an achievement regardless of who is haunting it.

People who stay there report varying things. Some report nothing at all. Good sleep. Comfortable bed. Historical house. Very nice.

Some report footsteps. Cold spots. The feeling of being watched from the mirror. The sound of children in empty hallways. A man in a black hat at the foot of the bed.

The staff, when asked, say: yes, that happens sometimes.

They say it the way you say it when it has been happening for forty years and you have made your peace with it. The way you say it when the thing that should be alarming has become, through sheer repetition, a kind of normal.

That is the thing about haunted houses that function as businesses. The ghosts become part of the service. The haunting becomes part of what you are paying for.

And somewhere in the house, on the seventeenth step, something keeps trying to make it to the landing.

It has been trying since 1871.

It has not made it yet.